The editor’s introduction to Vol. 17.1 frames the issue as a kind of chiasm — four features paired thematically with four book reviews, with Anthony Neal’s Author Meets Critics session at the center. The bookends are cosmopolitan in orientation: Corey Barnes draws upon Alain Locke to argue that normative cosmopolitanism and liberal neutrality are compatible rather than in tension. For Barnes, the apparent impasse dissolves once we recognize that the core democratic values Locke identifies — liberty, equality, and fraternity — are not merely political preferences but the fundamental presuppositions of any free association whatsoever. A state committed to pluralism need not remain neutral about the values that make pluralism possible in the first place; it need only remain neutral about any conception of the good that does not violate those foundational associative values. The result is a Lockean case for cosmopolitan obligation that does not require prior cosmopolitan commitment from the reader.
The two remaining articles address the personal and civic dimensions of nonviolent commitment. Sanjay Lal’s “Affirming a Vital Connection” takes up a question peace theorists have largely left to academic philosophy: whether death is a harm to the one who dies, and what hangs on the answer for nonviolent practice. Drawing on Epicurus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius — and finding an unexpected ally in Gandhi — Lal argues that disavowing death as the greatest evil is not merely compatible with a fully engaged moral life but essential to it. The standard objection, pressed by Steven Luper, is that adopting an Epicurean attitude toward death would produce coldness and passionlessness, since it requires indifference to the thwarting of our deepest desires. Gandhi’s life is Lal’s counter-evidence: what Gandhi’s fearlessness toward death actually required was not indifference to life’s projects but a reorientation of priorities — away from external goods toward the internal harms of fear, anger, and moral failure, which Gandhi regarded as the only evils truly within our power to avoid. John Nolt’s “Anger, Despondence, and Nonviolence” begins in his environmental ethics classroom at Tennessee the morning after the election — smoke from the Great Smoky Mountain fires visible from his office window, students shaken — and moves outward to the April 2017 People’s Climate March in Washington. Nolt’s argument is autobiographical and practical: despondence is often unexpressed anger, anger is better than withdrawal, and nonviolence is the discipline that transmutes the energy of anger into sustained action rather than impulsive reaction. His account of the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium and the five years that separated it from the U.S. withdrawal offers activists a long view of what marches accomplish, and his closing injunction — “Get active. Vote. Teach. Live sustainably. Organize.” — doubles as the issue’s own political address to its readers.
The Author Meets Critics forum centers on Anthony Neal’s Common Ground (Africa World Press, 2015), which brings Howard Thurman and Huey Newton into philosophical dialogue as two figures working within the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle who reached opposite conclusions about the source and nature of consciousness. For Thurman, consciousness is grounded in the mind of God disclosed through nature and mystical experience; for Newton, consciousness is a property of the material world, shaped by the violent contradictions of urban Black life and best analyzed through Marx. The session was hosted at the 2016 Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference under the direction of Tommy Curry. Critic Dwayne Tunstall engages Thurman’s phenomenology directly, proposing that what Thurman is doing is better described as “conjuring phenomenology” — not disclosing features of Being but constituting a healing social vision through language and symbol, in the tradition of Theophus Smith’s analysis of African American conjure culture. Tunstall’s challenge to Neal is whether Thurman’s account of Being as inherently life-affirming can survive the life-denying disclosures of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing anti-Black violence. Critic Felipe Hinojosa widens the aperture considerably, situating the Thurman-Newton comparison within a colonial history that includes Latin America and the Caribbean from 1898 onward, and arguing that the revolutionary consciousness both figures cultivated was not confined to the Black-white racial binary but intersected with Latinx struggle throughout. Neal’s responses affirm both readings and leave the question between Thurman’s spiritual and Newton’s materialist paths deliberately open, in the spirit of Platonic dialogue — the reader is invited into the debate rather than handed a resolution.
Four book reviews complete the issue. Rick Werner reviews Robert Holmes’s Pacifism (Bloomsbury, 2017), finding it the most complete and compelling philosophical case for pacifism yet written. Holmes’s central argument is that whole wars — the totality of a conflict across all parties — are presumptively wrong because at least one side in any justified partial war is necessarily fighting unjustly; the burden of proof to overcome that presumption cannot be met in practice so long as nonviolent alternatives exist, and he demonstrates at length that they do. Sanjay Lal reviews Andrew Fitz-Gibbon’s Talking to Terrorists, Nonviolence, and Counter-Terrorism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), which draws on the Northern Ireland peace process — specifically the decision of Catholic and Loyalist leaders to open dialogue with those responsible for terrorist acts — to propose a rough but viable road map for progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lal finds the book’s philosophical implications richer than Fitz-Gibbon fully develops: the Northern Ireland example suggests that even radical forgiveness may be morally required of victims, and that fruitful negotiations need no dominant moral exemplar to succeed. Bat-Ami Bar On reviews David Miller’s Strangers in Our Midst (Oxford University Press, 2016), a philosophically sophisticated defense of principled, restrictive immigration policy framed by weak cosmopolitanism, national self-determination, fairness, and social integration. Bar On finds Miller’s realism useful for anyone trying to engage seriously with objections to open borders, but reports that the book’s argumentative complexity — its sustained engagement with opposing positions in every chapter — made it difficult to teach, a limitation she notes with some reluctance given how urgently its arguments are needed. Court Lewis reviews Eddy Souffrant’s edited collection A Future without Borders? Theories and Practices of Cosmopolitan Peacebuilding (Brill-Rodopi, 2016), which examines how state violence and the border regimes that sustain national identity are structurally entangled, and what cosmopolitan alternatives to that entanglement might look like in practice — a fitting close to an issue that opened, with Barnes, by asking what cosmopolitanism is owed and why.
The Acorn Journal 